In a sewing machine equipped with a needle oscillating in the direction of feed, the needle plate has a stitch hole designed as a slot. This stitch slot extends in the direction of feed. As a consequence of this, the interlock of the initial stitches, especially of the first stitch, will come undone due to the lack of friction between the threads at the edge of the stitch slot on the pulling by the thread lever, and satisfactory stitches will be prevented from forming. This happens mainly in the case of short thread ends after a thread cutting operation.